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Author Hanna Rosin says women are taking over from men. Is she right?

Rosin is late to the wake, argues Jim Coyle. Men have been chronicling their own demise for years. Decades. Centuries.

Are men getting squeezed out by women? (mike agliolo / getty images)

By Jim Coylefeature writer

Fri., Sept. 14, 2012

“I just wish a woman would tell me one thing I didn’t already know,” a voice that sounded like Charley Quarters said.

— from Richard Ford’s 2012 novel Canada.

Well, lads, as the late, great Dandy Don Meredith used to warble when the Monday Night Football clock was winding down and the game was pretty much out of reach: “Turrrrn out the lightttts, the par-tee’s ovv-errr.”

It was a good run while it lasted. We had some laughs. But, truth be told, it’s pretty much all been downhill for men since old Adam had his head turned by Eve.

As the dinosaurs, and the Edsel, and the Montreal Expos and the Progressive Conservative party of Canada found out, some things just weren’t built to last.

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Hanna Rosin has spoken. Again. And according to her, men are dead. Toast. Expired.

Two years ago, Rosin wrote a cover story for the Atlantic magazine titled “The End of Men: How Women are Taking Control — of Everything.”

To rub it in, the cover had one of those gender symbols indicating “male,” with the little arrow coming out of the circle drooping something awful.

Now, Rosin has turned her article into a book. Also titled The End of Men: And the Rise of Women.

A guy can hardly concentrate on making his NFL picks for the weekend over the din of her death knells.

“The modern economy is becoming a place where women hold the cards,” she crows. Women are plastic and adaptable, while men are. . . cardboard.

“Women are choosing to stay single rather than marry men who can’t step up and provide.”

“Men need marriage more than women do,” she writes. “In fact, they need it to survive.”

The best men can hope for, she says, is the sort of “broken nobility” of Norm on Cheers, that museum of manhood as it once was.

Rosin goes so far as to whack men with the corpse of another dead thing. Communism. Even those few men not yet expired, she said, are “haunted by the spectre of a coming gender apocalypse.”

Still, it’s hard to argue with her.

Yes, there’s been a “he-cession.” Yes, the worst-hit sectors were traditionally male domains. Yes, the age of testosterone is probably over for good, and the old “architecture of manliness” has crumbled, and women are taking over colleges and engineering and commerce and medical faculties, and are increasingly the household breadwinners, and men are (even more than usually) baffled.

Lady, we’ve been chronicling our own demise for years. Decades. Centuries. (It’s the one benefit of having our heads forever buried in our own navels.)

Long before Nick Hornby and Hugh Grant began wallowing in the avails of winsome male ineffectuality, and Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen sang dirges to the loss of manly work and the sort of towns in which men wore the pants in their manly working-class castles, men knew the jig was pretty much up.

It’s been better than 150 years since Thoreau retreated to his man cave at Walden Pond and declared that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

Back in the 1920s, that manliest of men, Ernest Hemingway, had one of his characters presciently lament that “there aren’t any bullfighters any more.”

Now, Hanna Rosin is here to gloat that there’s a bull market in quiet desperation, and there aren’t all that many coal-miners or steelworkers or riggers left either.

Like a lot of things, it all sort of snuck up on men.

By 1990, Robert Bly had written his blockbuster Iron John and sent swarms of us — lost, but belatedly willing to ask directions — into the woods to dance around campfires and try to figure out what in blazes had happened.

“It is clear to men that the images of adult manhood given by the popular culture are worn out,” he wrote.

“The grief in men has been increasing steadily since the start of the Industrial Revolution and the grief has reached a depth now that cannot be ignored.”

In 1993, we’d gone beyond Bly’s grief to Garrison Keillor’s self-mockery in The Book of Guys.

“Men peak at age 19 and go downhill, we know that. . . ”

“Years ago, manhood was an opportunity for achievement, and now it is a problem to be overcome. Plato, St. Francis, Michelangelo, Mozart, Leonardo da Vinci, Vince Lombardi, Van Gogh — you don’t find guys of that calibre today, and if there are any, they are not painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or composing Don Giovanni.

“They are trying to be Mr. OK, all-rite, the man who can bake a cherry pie, go play basketball, come home, make melon balls and whip up a great soufflé. . .”

“Men may not yet perceive that they have been bested in a confusing war, though they may be vaguely aware that they are uncomfortable.”

Sort of like when their wives bought them briefs that were the wrong size.

Prof. Tiger blamed the birth-control pill for all this. And it’ll have to do until a better rationalization comes along.

For now, we’ve got to get our Pro-Line picks made before we pick the kids up from school and get the dinner in the microwave.

Just remember, Ms. Rosin, as Robert Bly said, “no stage is the final stop.”

There have been books written recently called The End of History and The End of Poverty. And neither of those seem to have gone anywhere.

Need we remind you about Truman and Dewey?

About the 2004 Red Sox being three down to the Yankees and bouncing back to win the World Series?

About the Montreal Alouettes stealing a Grey Cup from Saskatchewan after missing a field goal on what looked to be the game’s last play in 2009?

Miracles happen. And remember, lady:

It ain’t over till the fat guy with no job, no clue and no prospects sitting reading the sports pages while he waits for the missus to bring home the bacon sings.

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